Profile Information

"SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users” - Moz

Bio:

The Internet Works is a full service digital agency established in London in 2008, employing over 100 experts across our group of companies in online advertising sales, web software development, SEO and graphic design. In 2014 TIW became a Google Partners accredited agency for Google AdWords.
Our aim is to help our clients make more money from their web presence. We do this by providing a range of specialist services including Web Advertising Sales, Online Advertising Solutions, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Software Design, Web Applications, Social Media Management and Web Design.
Our clients range from one man band start-ups to FTSE 100 companies across a wide range of projects. The end focus is always to add financial value to your business – the more successful we can make you the more you’ll work with us! This is why most of our new business comes from referrals.

Our experience shows that negative SEO is alive and it works. Like others in this thread, we gained a client because they had a suffered a massive drop in visits. We identified the problem immediately (manual penalty) and set to work.

The attack was on three core keywords (and their derivatives) that had been driving the majority of search traffic to the client's site. Almost everyday we saw new bad links being added across the www. In fact, we can see that they are still at it - although we have removed the penalty by now, so hopefully they're just wasting their time.

After some discussions with the client we found out that a previous employee had left on bad terms and proceeded to set-up a competing site. We are 99% certain that this person set-up the negative SEO attack. Looks like they hired a spammer based in India or Philippines - as far as we could tell.

But removal of the penalty has come at a cost. We had to remove / disavow some perfectly legitimate links (non-paid for, natural, freely given links by authoritative websites in the client's sector, not KW anchor linked) because they were identified by Google in our initial, failed, re-inclusion requests, as being bad. We spoke to some of these websites' owners about removing or no-following links and they were aghast that they might be considered 'bad sites'. Even more crazy, a couple of them were non-commercial, local govt sites. So whilst the client's site has recovered it's down from its previous levels. Google identifying some of these sites as bad links was, IOO, wrong.

Like Yonatan, we had a good client. It's cost them a bunch of money to fix something they did not deserve to be punished for, but they've backed us all the way. However, apart from picking up such a great client, the whole process has left a bad taste in the mouth. The penalty removal work was beyond boring, involved no creativity, infected one of our computers with a bad virus, and added nothing to the general benefit of mankind. It removed resources away from creating great content or useful apps and helping the client's customers. And it seems so pointless, when all Google had to do was discount any links they thought were bad.

So I look at all the effort, the buzz, the fluff, the penalties, the pandas, penguins, the caffeines, the knowledge graphs, the universals etc etc etc and I ask myself: is Google search any better than it was before? And honestly, I would say "not much".

In fact, in some sectors, it's got worse.

You know the best way I find what I'm looking for using search? By refining my search. So I try once. The results are close but not quite right. So I refine / alter my search. Closer, almost there, but I can see from the results what Google is thinking, so I refine again, and bam! got it. Whole process took less than 20 seconds.

Stop thinking for me Google and let me do the brain work. Just give me results based on clear rules.

we just tried "brandname uk" and, because the brand name is also an adjective, we got fed pages which had the adjective in and the 'uk' in - but not together - i.e. the adjective may be mentioned in one part of an article and then later in the article the word UK.

So my biggest long-term client got hit by Penguin. But here's the thing: I don't do link-building. Never have. Hate the whole process. Always ignored all the 'here's how to create great links' type posts on SEOMoz etc. and concentrated on white hat SEO techniques and great content.

So now I'm looking at a 60% fall in organic traffic for what is a clean, well-designed, sector-leading website. NONE of my other sites have been hit. Indeed, most of them seem to be up a little bit following Penguin. Just this one - my main client.

And sure enough, it looks like the affected site has spammy / bad links. BUT I NEVER CREATED THEM. Neither did the client. Crappy sites linked to us and now we pay the penalty. So, quite frankly, Google can go **** **** ****** ****** ***** ***** **** ******** ***** ***** ******** ***** with a feather and three aardvarks.

Matt Cutts tells us to build great sites with great info. Sure Matt, we'll get right back to doing that, as we were before, once we've wasted 3 months trying to contact uninterested spamweb masters to ask them if they'll remove their links to our site.